The X-Variant (The Guardians Book 1)

by Rosemary Cole

  “How did you know—oh, yeah. Your drones.” He leaned forward. “I’ve been meaning to ask—how does that work? I’m just curious. How do they tell you stuff? Do they speak to you in words?”

  Kala didn’t answer for a moment, considering how to frame her answer. “No, they do not speak. They pass information to my symbiont, who passes it to me. I do hear the simulated words of others, brought to me by my drones. And music. Sometimes, I get a sort of internal display of information. Maps and diagrams.”

  She realized that her description fell far short of the rich, complex reality of the Dronet. But it was too daunting a task to try to explain in English this constantly changing inner landscape of people and things, the tide of words and information put by millions of minds onto the Dronet, creating a sea of information which could be pulled from at will. She could dive into it, barely skim it, or fly far above like a bird, ignoring it. Any part or all of it could be dimmed down, tuned out altogether, shifted around, or isolated and brought into fine focus. Not to mention added to.

  “Does everything spoken by every Unathi automatically go on the Dronet?”

  It took her a moment to understand his question, it was so oddly framed in English. She shook her head. “No, only what someone wishes to share. It can also be used for private communication between any number of people.”

  “So you don’t communicate with each other with your thoughts, then,” he said.

  She laughed. “No.”

  “What’s the display in your head like? Ain’t it distracting?”

  She sighed. “Later, Brandon. Please allow me to concentrate on getting back to the highway.”

  “Okay,” he said mildly and sat back again as she picked her way, with the help of her drones, around the outskirts of Napa. They arrived back at the highway a few miles north of the small city, the Jeep covered with a thick coat of dust. She turned north toward Clearlake and increased speed.

  The sun had climbed higher and it was growing hot; Kala turned on the air conditioning with a vocal command. The highway decreased to two lanes lined with pale, scrawny trees. The road was mostly empty; occasionally they passed an abandoned or wrecked car. As they moved further north, they drove through small towns that looked as though they had been abandoned long ago.

  In the last thirty years or so, Araka intoned, millions of North Americans left the towns and smaller cities and moved to a megacity, where they could get around more easily and be looked after.

  Why did they need to be looked after? Kala asked. Wasn’t this before the viral pandemic?

  Well, yes, but the whole world was suffering from a global financial crash, as well as other crises. There were very few jobs for ordinary people. A huge proportion were living on government subsistence payments, and they could no longer afford to run cars with the cost of fuel rising above ten dollars per gallon. Neither could they continue to maintain their homes, so they were forced to move to substandard government housing in the cities. Ergo, I think you’ll find the countryside to be fairly empty, for the most part.

  Good, that will work in our favor.

  It could make it more difficult to find food, he pointed out.

  Thanks for bringing up something else for me to worry about, Araka.

  Very happy to be of service, dear one.

  As the going had become relatively easy, Kala chose this time to explain to Brandon and Jennie why they’d had to leave.

  “Someone was trying to kill me?” Jennie exclaimed. “Why?”

  “Because you carry the epsilon virus. So does your baby. Once you asked me which of you humans we Unathi were supposed to save. Well, I am finally answering that question. We are supposed to save only betas. More than that, we have been instructed to terminate—kill—all the epsilons we can.”

  They gasped.

  “Brandon is a beta,” Kala said grimly. “You, Jennie, and your baby are epsilons.”

  Jennie gazed at her silently for a moment. “So you fooled them into thinking I’m a beta, but they found out, and now I’m a target.”

  “Yes.” The girl was definitely quick.

  “Oh, my God.” Jennie put her head in her hands.

  “I will do everything in my power to keep all of you safe,” Kala said.

  “She can do it, babe,” Brandon said, wrapping an arm around his partner. “Trust me, we’re gonna be okay.”

  “How are we gonna be okay?” Jennie cried. “We just left all our food behind in that garden we worked so hard to make. What are we supposed to live on?”

  Kala said, “We will find a way,” and then lapsed into silence.

  After a while, Brandon began teaching Wilm more words in English.

  They drove all day, eating rations on the move, stopping only briefly to stretch their legs and relieve themselves. The sky was a deep, relentless blue and the sun flashed in their eyes painfully, but the views of the forested, mountainous lands to the east were spectacular. It was hot and dry here in the peak of summer, but they had enough water for now, and Kala had brought a small Unathi device for purifying freshwater.

  She kept starting to attune to the Dronet and then stopping herself, remembering that her drones were staying incommunicado. This left her blind, which made her nervous. She had no way to know what was going on. The news of what she had done had probably spread to Guardian refuges up and down the West Coast, as well as inland. But it seemed reasonable to assume that no one had tracked her, and that made her relax a little.

  By midafternoon, the humans had fallen asleep, and Kala and Wilm fell into a deep conversation as the miles rolled away beneath them, discussing everything from Unathi technology to the history of the twenty-first century.

  Wilm said, “When I look around and see how our ancestors really lived, I think it’s a miracle that the humans survived long enough for us to come into being. They seem intent on hurting each other and destroying the Earth, their only home. They nearly wiped themselves out with the virus. There’s a real sickness at work in that kind of self-destructive behavior, don’t you think?”

  “Yes, I agree with you, but what we’re doing seems wrong to me,” Kala said. “Coming back to this time and killing people, tearing their lives apart. We’re told there must be sacrifice, that sometimes you have to do bad things to achieve a good end, but I’m not convinced that’s true. If it is, how are we any different from these people? The ones who developed and released the virus—I bet they were convinced it was all for a good cause. They probably believed they were saving the Earth by doing what they did.”

  “But what’s the alternative?” he argued. “Just let the Unathi die out completely? What good will that serve? Think of all that would be lost.”

  Kala sighed, looking out at the dry hills as she drove. Heat shimmered in pools above the cracked asphalt of the road. “I don’t know. I just don’t know what’s right anymore.” She grimaced, holding back tears. “I can’t see my way forward, Wilm. It’s not right to do what I’m doing, but it’s not right to do anything else. It’s tearing me apart.”

  Her voice broke and he reached over and laid a warm hand on her shoulder, not saying anything.

  She breathed deeply a few times and then said, “We’re changing—you must see that. Maybe the Bei aren’t going to be the perfect Unathi race we hoped for. If the only alternative is to spoil what we were, perhaps it’s not worth saving us. Maybe we shouldn’t have come back here, but just let the X-crisis take its course.” She wouldn’t have dared say this to anyone but Wilm; even so, she could tell by his sudden stillness that he was disturbed by her words.

  “I can’t accept that,” he said at last. “It’s nihilistic. You’re saying we should have just embraced our own end—the end of all humanity, everywhere.”

  “You know I don’t see it that way,” she protested. “It’s just—I hate that it has to be done like this. I can’t accept it. I wish there had been some other way.”

  “So do I, but there wasn’t. We tried, Kala—there just was
n’t any other way.” He gently squeezed her shoulder. “I know this is hard for you, sweet girl. But maybe you should remind yourself from time to time that the greater good must count for something, as well?”

  Kala sighed and nodded. They were passing Clearlake, flashes of sparkling blue water on their right between the pines. She considered stopping, but was reluctant. There was still time and she wanted to put more distance between them and SanFran.

  She knew from her drones that the road ended just north of the lake, teeing into a local route which ran east and west. The land to the north bristled with steep mountains and thick forests—basically impassable. Reluctantly she turned west, back toward Route 101 and the coast. Just for a while, she thought.

  As she drove, she spied a few homes here and there, set well back off the road. Her drones reported clusters of humans, and she saw wisps of smoke rising from one of the chimneys.

  The baby began to fuss, and the humans stirred.

  “I need to pee,” announced Jennie.

  Brandon yawned, looked out the window and said, “I always heard there were a few people up here trying to live off the grid.”

  “Off the grid? What is that?” Kala asked.

  “Well, they live on their own land and try to be completely self-sufficient. Grow their own food, keep animals, generate their own power, stuff like that. Kind of like what we were trying to do at the Greenie commune. They’re preppers; guess they’ve been expecting some kinda disaster to happen for a long time and wanted to be ready for it.”

  “Clever of them,” she remarked.

  “They must also have guns and know how to use them if they haven’t been taken by raiders by now,” commented Jennie, jiggling the baby.

  “Well, they are way out here in the middle of nowhere,” Brandon pointed out. “That probably helps.”

  Kala slowed the Jeep and looked at the houses with greater interest. Perhaps they could trade with these self-sufficient humans. But this area was still too close to SanFran for her liking. She shook her head and drove on.

  Chapter 19

  Liet’s Journal

  SanFran Guardian Refuge

  July 11, 2079

  I still can’t believe she’s gone. My world just keeps on shrinking.

  As they were pulling out, I sent a few of my drones to attach themselves to the underside of the Jeep. I probably shouldn’t have done it; someone’s sure to find out. But I couldn’t bear the thought of never seeing her again. It’s comforting to think that I could find her someday, that I might be able to see her again.

  I haven’t told Crisfer what I’ve done; I’m too scared of what he might do. Ever since the fight, he’s either been in a rage or else cool and distant, lost in himself. He won’t even let me touch him. I’ve never seen him like this before. He won’t let me talk about her, forbids me to even say her name. I don’t dare disobey; if I do, he’s sure to leave me and he’s all I have left. I can’t lose him, too.

  Oh, how I wish Jaen were here. Maybe I should have stayed behind, after all.

  Yeah, probably.

  I can’t even concentrate on my reading anymore. I’m losing everything, little by little. And it’s not finished, I know that. That storm is still out there on the horizon, getting bigger and darker. I can feel it coming, getting closer every day. It’s coming for me.

  The afternoon was cooling and the sun dawdling toward the Pacific when Kala turned east off Route 101, well south of McKinley Mega. The highway they were on was gradually bending west, taking them straight to the huge megacity that lay on the coast. Kala didn’t want to get caught in there, especially with night coming on, and she anxiously sent her drones ahead to look for a way around it to the east.

  They led her on a jagged, broken northward course over country roads and dirt tracks, paralleling the megacity on the coast. Endless pine trees marched along beside them, their shadows striping the road. At first they had looked pretty; now, with the sun starting to go down, they had assumed a forbidding air. The land became rougher, the roads less frequent, and the humans were getting tired from the constant swaying and jostling. The baby cried for hours, and then finally slept.

  Slowly, night swallowed the dusk. Kala kept driving, not bothering to put the headlights on. Her own vision was superior to their illumination, and she had her drones. The Jeep was quiet, running as it did on hydrogen fuel, and she preferred to travel with stealth.

  At her drones’ guidance, she followed a dry creek bed that took them to a wide river. She turned and drove east alongside it on a rough dirt track. The jostling woke Brandon, and he sat up and peered around. The river lay next to them like a dark ribbon; on the opposite shore, a few scattered lights gleamed.

  “What’s that?” Brandon asked, yawning.

  “That is the easternmost point of the megacity I am trying to avoid,” she said. “There is a bridge further up this way where we can cross the river into it.”

  They picked their way along, the Jeep lurching into ruts and climbing out of them like a ship at sea. The bridge slowly came into sight.

  “Looks like it’s gonna take us right into the city,” Brandon observed.

  Kala brought the Jeep to a stop and sat still for a moment, consulting her drones. The bridge did lead into the megacity’s district of Blue Lake, but it would be a short haul through it and out the other side, back into the countryside, where there were plenty of back roads they could use.

  “There is no other way,” she said.

  “No lights,” Wilm said, who was quickly picking up English. “Is okay.”

  No lights meant the bridge was probably unguarded, and Kala’s drones confirmed this. She took a deep breath and drove forward.

  The streets of Blue Lake were deserted. They passed through forests of buildings hulking in the dark. Kala sent her drones out a little further on all sides, checking for humans. What was that a herd of deer?

  She slammed on the brakes, spinning the wheel at the same time. Brandon yelped as everyone was thrown sideways.

  “Ghal,” Wilm cried. “Many!”

  Kala had already sensed them, a great swarm of Ghal pouring down upon the mega from the east. She cursed herself. She was tired and had gotten careless with her drones.

  The Jeep fishtailed out of the one-eighty and Kala stomped on the gas, charging back toward the bridge. A cacophony of howls and snarls reached their ears, growing slightly more distant, and Kala hoped they had left them all behind, but dark shapes lurched onto the road ahead of them, pouring out from between buildings. Jennie gave a little scream and clutched the baby to her chest.

  Kala yanked the wheel and the Jeep swerved and then veered back again, the vehicle shuddering as Ghal bodies thumped against its sides.

  “Where the hell did they all come from?” shouted Brandon.

  She didn’t answer, concentrating on trying to plow through the Ghal ahead of them. If they could just break through this bunch, she should be able to make it back over the river, where the Ghal might not follow.

  But there were just too many of them. Howling and gibbering, they flung themselves recklessly at the Jeep, hoping to seize one of its occupants and haul them out.

  Brandon had fished out the two iron bars that had been lying on the floor of the Jeep. He passed the tire iron to Wilm and used Bessie to strike at the arms and hands grasping at them through the open windows. Kala tried to steer with one hand and punch away Ghal that were clinging to her side of the vehicle. The Jeep caromed all over the road, losing traction as its wheels became entangled in Ghal bodies. Kala tried to regain control, but the vehicle roared past the entrance to the bridge and plunged down the bank toward the river. It hit the water with a loud splash and stopped, submerged up to the tops of the tires. They heard a hiss as the engine’s built-in snorkel engaged.

  Go deeper into the water—they won’t come in after you, urged Araka.

  Kala didn’t dare drive the Jeep in any deeper. “Everyone out. Quickly, into the water.”

&nb
sp; Brandon helped Jennie, holding the baby, scramble out through the back door and into deeper water, gripping her arm anxiously in case the bottom dropped away suddenly.

  Kala got out and Wilm slid to her side, which faced away from the shore, and clambered out after her. Ghal swarmed around the vehicle and the two Unathi began to fight, trying to keep the Ghal distracted long enough for the humans to escape. Kala fought with her hands, striking with her fists or seizing a Ghal and heaving it into the others, using them like weapons.

  Wilm, untrained, wielded his tire iron clumsily, and Kala saw that he was getting the worst of it. She realized that he was in danger of being overwhelmed. She maneuvered to get him behind her and they backed up together, fighting their way toward the center of the river.

  Brandon waded back to them and began laying into the Ghal with Bessie while Wilm staggered out to deeper water. Kala was glad she and Brandon were both wearing their body armor; the Ghal’s bites and scratches stood no chance of penetrating it. Together, they fought their way to deeper water, where the others stood shivering up to their waists. The Ghal fell back, unwilling to follow them any further.

  “Is anyone badly injured?” Kala asked. She stood next to Wilm to support him, examining his injuries. He was badly bitten and scratched, but his sym was already working on him and he was holding his own.

  “I’ll be all right,” he said in Unathi. “Are you okay, Kala? You were amazing back there.”

  She nodded, leaning toward Jennie to check her, but the girl seemed unhurt. She was trembling like a leaf, clutching the baby tightly to her shoulder.

  Brandon said, “I got a couple of bites on my arms and a lot of scratches. Kill me if I start turning into one of them, okay?”

  “I think you’ve seen too many zombie movies,” Jennie said through chattering teeth.

  Brandon snorted, then moved behind Jennie, wrapping his arms around her to keep her warm. He looked toward the shore. “So what do we do now?”